Why? You were an inexperienced group with just one game under their sleeves, so, why the hell you guys promised a game with the complexity of dwarf fortress in a 3d engine? You didnt had any experience in the genre, your budget and your team was obviously small, so why the hell did you guys do it? I know behind this game there is obviously a fucking drama and broken dreams and whatnot, but im just a consumer, so i dont give a shit. This was a disappointment. Rimworld is being done by 1 guy and its doing so much better. Wanting to make your dreams come real its fine and dandy, but adjusting to the reality of your environment its better. I hope this game was a lesson you guys learned.
The only people that rode a horse were the developers of this game that thought that with no experience in a complex genre, a small staff and not a lot of money could do what was envisioned in the first 2 years of blogposts.
And despite all you write, I enjoy the game a lot. Definitely got my moneys worth, and still have a lot of play left.
I don't regret it, I got more hours out of this than a lot of other games I've bought. Having said that, though, to say I'm hurt by the complete lack of communication regarding anything that's happened since 1.0D (including the assurances that they wouldn't be doing exactly what they turned around and did) would be an understatement. :/
Sometimes, people have dreams. Whether you can get to them is a question that may not always be answerable before you try. The Gaslamp Games team had a dream of making a specific kind of game. It was a good dream. It still is, in a way. Could they have been more careful with their stuff? Sure, they could have been. But, you know, indie game development is a business in which sometimes you have to take risk and sometimes you have to play it carefully, and you don't always know which it is. They team had a dream, they thought it worth it to take a risk. Miscalculation it might have been, but they did try, for the sake of their dream, for the sake of making the game they did want to make. Back when they decided to go for it and try to reach that dream, I did not know that it would end with what it did; I had no reason to even suspect it would turn out the way it had. Neither did you, and I presume neither did any of them. As such, they did not get any warnings, and now none of us can jump and shout “I told you so”, for nobody did tell them so. The fact that what is happening actually is happening is, in more than one way, sad, and I will state this no matter how many times the question is asked; I do, tentatively, blame them for cutting off contact which, if it happens to be intentional, is a somewhat cowardly move that I did not expect any of them to make. However, I cannot, and I do not, blame them for trying even if they did not actually succeed.
Eh, it is a risky endeavor, and things wouldn't be risky if they always turned out right. Though, you can make better bets or worse ones, and probably as far as risk-reward goes, the Dredmor-type gamble is probably better than the CE-type gamble (smaller in scale, smaller upfront, etc...). It's possible things came down pretty close on the wire at the end, in which case it very nearly paid off, but it's always hard to tell with 1 data point.
Wait, did they really cut off contact? I haven't been on this forum for a while because it's been pretty dead anyway
We do know that they said they are going to be out of contact for a while as they are moving (that was December-ish 2016), and then all the contact was lost and there are clues scattered around that say that something has gone behind the scenes and the result is a mess. That said, unless they've put themselves all into an NDA and thus cannot speak of anything once it became a mess, or for whatever reason their access to the forum became blocked due to that, I really don't see why, when at least some of the Gaslamp Games people do seem to have internet access, nobody actually said anything. Well, I do see a few possible “whys”, but those, though understandable, aren't good “whys” objectively speaking. That is why the fact that there is no contact from them is objectively a bad thing for them.
I'm with you, Kaze. I think all the members of Gaslamp have always been stand-up people, and I've always admired their integrity and approach in an industry that's often unnecessarily cruel or juvenile. I really dislike that they've jumped ship completely, moreso that they deliberately (I feel) mislead/lied to us about what we could expect in terms of support/updates for CE. I'm still planning to follow and support their work independently, but I'm going to be a lot more careful from now on. I hate Early Access generally and almost never buy games in EA. Clockwork Empires was one of the only games I've ever made an exception for, and while I don;t regret my purchase, per se, I've certainly learned my lesson. So while I disagree with OP's tone, I have to admit I kinda feel the same way*. At what point did Gaslamp decide they were going to burn their bridges? Was it before or after they lied about future content updates and told us to give it great Steam reviews on launch? How long were they stringing us along, hoping we'd get them one or two more sales before they ghosted? (* except the stuff about rimworld - I haven't played it and won't until it's out of EA).
